Discover Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood

Under Milk Wood was the last of Dylan’s works, but, in many ways, the culmination of them. It was written for radio and is told through narration and a host of eccentric characters. You watch them ‘through the eyes’ of blind Captain Cat, witness the daily activities of the small Welsh town Llareggub (spell that backwards!) and end up loving them, despite their flaws. Yet, also remember, as Dylan said, ‘Love the words, love the words’.

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Influences on Under Milk Wood

A friend of Dylan’s, Bert Trick, said the seed of the idea for the play was planted much earlier than many people realise, during his teenage years living in Swansea. “…the embryonic Under Milk Wood he had written in 1933, and he read it to Nell and me in our bungalow at Caswell around the old Dover stove, with the paraffin lamps lit at night …the story was then called Llareggub, which was a mythical village in South Wales, typical village, with terraced houses with one ty bach (lavatory) and about five cottages, and the various characters coming out and emptying the slops and exchanging greetings and so on; that was the germ of the idea which developed into Under Milk Wood…”

Antony Penrose, son of the artist Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller believes that the surrealist movement in London in the 1930s influenced his style. “Would he have reached the same wonderful free association his lines hold if everything he wrote was rationally filtered?” In particular, he draws on the influence of Picasso’s play; ‘Desire Caught By The Tail’ that has lush and often sensual language and its pictorial qualities carries no discernable plot line or narrative. It was performed in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1950 and Dylan Thomas portrayed the character of Onion, though the review in Picture Post described his role as the ‘Stage Manager’, suggesting perhaps he was also given the lines of stage direction.

Or perhaps the darker elements of the Second World War, in particular the holocaust, and the concentration camps, may have played a part too. He revealed plans for Under Milk Wood to his friend Constantine Fitzgibbon. Originally, it was to be called, ‘The Town That Was Mad’. In it, the town, Llareggub is declared, ‘insane, anti-social and dangerous…lest its dotty inhabitants infect the rest of the world with their feckless and futile view of life, barbed wire should be strung about it and the perimeter patrolled by sentries. But the villagers don’t mind at all (though they do grumble about the disappearance of the buses) as Llareggub is clearly now the only place in the whole world that is left truly free, sane and happy…’ Though, another friend Gwen Watkins is convinced that Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where many of Dylan’s friends were based in the war, might have had some influence too!

Development of Under Milk Wood

Dylan had clearly had the gem of an idea for Under Milk in his teenage years as he included a similar type play in his school magazine, discussed it with Bert Trick in 1932 and used Llareggub in his early stories. By the 1940s, when working on his film scripts and broadcasts, in particular The Londoner, he was beginning to experiment with different language techniques and using voices to narrate stories. The stages of how Under Milk Wood finally came together are listed below.

1) In 1944 Dylan was living at Majoda bungalow in New Quay, Cardiganshire, and whilst living there imagined a day in the life of the town for a radio talk he called “Quite Early One Morning”. The piece was broadcast on the BBC in December 1944, and shares some characters and dialogue with Under Milk Wood. There is some sequence of time, though limited to the morning hours and in winter, not spring; we hear the dreams of the sleeping town and see the sleepers getting up and going about their business. Characters that appear again are: Captain Tiny Evans and Rev. Thomas Evans (though as Captain Cat and Rev. Eli Jenkins), Myfanwy Price, Mog Edwards and Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard who is already giving her dead husbands their tasks. “Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing room floor; and before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.

2) Dylan originally planned to call his play “The Town That Was Mad” and had the idea that a town of eccentrics would be prosecuted in court and declared insane. He was working on this basis in 1950 but later abandoned this storyline for the Under Milk Wood we know today.
The ideas was that the town would be declared an ‘insane area’. Captain Cat, spokesman for the town, insists that the sanity of the town should be put on trial in the town hall. He will be counsel for the defence and the citizens themselves will be witnesses. The trial takes place, but comes to a surprising end. The final speech for the prosecution gives a description of the ideally sane town; as soon as they hear this, the people withdraw their defence and beg to be cordoned off from the sane world as soon as possible.

3) In a letter to Princess Caetani in October 1951 he encloses a manuscript and has called it, “Llareggub. A piece for Radio Perhaps’. The script was developed further by May 1952 and the first half of the play was published in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure as Llaregubb.

4) Dylan was scheduled to perform Under Milk Wood on his third reading tour to North America but arrived in April 1953 with the script still incomplete. His friend Liz Reitell who was assistant to John Malcolm Brinnin the director of the Poetry Center in New York, resorted to locking Dylan inside the apartment of photographer Rollie McKenna in an attempt to encourage him to finish it in time for the first performance.

5) Following a solo reading of his still unfinished play at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Dylan left his final changes to the last minute before the first cast performance of Under Milk Wood at the Poetry Center, New York, on May 14th 1953. By chance, a decision was made to record the performance on a tape recorder and so the only known recording of Dylan reading his most famous work was made. Also captured was the audience reaction. Perhaps not knowing what to expect, the audience are initially quiet, but gradually more and more laughter greets the comic passages, and the play ends to a rapturous ovation. Dylan Thomas can be heard saying ‘thank you, thank you”.

6) Walford Davies and Ralph Maud joined forces in 1995 to produce Under Milk Wood The Definitive Edition. Using a variety of sources, they have adapted the play to how they envisage Dylan would have completed it. Dylan did not have the chance to edit, or make any final revision of the text, before his death. The changes they have made include the conflation of the First and Second Verses into one voice, headed ‘First Voice’.

Where is Llareggub?

It has been suggested that the original concept of Under Milk Wood was thought up as early as 1933 in Swansea but what other places inspired the fictional town of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood? There have been many theories.

Was it the west Wales sea town New Quay where he lived at the end of the Second World War? While staying there he wrote a radio play called “Quite Early One Morning“, which was broadcast in August 1945, and featured a number of the characters that appear again in his play for voices. Dylan’s sketch map of Llarregub, drawn to help him during the composition of the play, has a layout reminiscent of New Quay. The map is now part of the National Library of Wales collection.

Or could it be the Welsh speaking Carmarthenshire towns, such as Ferryside and Llansteffan? He visited them regularly, as both a child and adult, and certainly would have absorbed the atmosphere of the communities and met the local characters in the village pubs.

Or how about his final home, Laugharne, the estuary town in west Wales? He knew the town well as he had both lived, and visited it, since his late teens. His daughter, Aeronwy Thomas described hearing him practise the characters voices while working in his writing shed, or while bathing in the bath, surrounded by soggy sweets. “ I crept upstairs and listened outside the bathroom while the deep bass changed into a woman’s sultry contralto. I think it must have been Dai Bread’s wives from Under Milk Wood…He explained the two wives to me before, on my insistence. ‘Dai Bread – he’s the baker – is married to two wives. In some countries men marry more than two wives and that becomes a harem.” The thought of two wives worried young Aeronwy until her mother said that it would happen over her dead body. She then knew it would never happen as her Mum was in charge! Dylan’s last broadcast, ‘Laugharne’, was transmitted just days before his death, while he lay in a hospital bed at St Vincent’s Hospital in New York.

Maybe some ideas came from outside of Wales? Dylan lived in a small Oxfordshire village called South Leigh in the late 1940s and locals from the time claim that they themselves were the real No Good Boyo and Mrs Dai Bread 2. More recently, someone has suggested that as Dylan occasionally drank in the Half Moon public house in Herne Hill, which is directly opposite a Milk Wood Road, that this might have provided inspiration for the name.

It is likely that Dylan took ideas from all these places as many people remember him making notes on the back of his cigarette packets including a friend John Morgan Dark, “Oh, yes, they were usually woodbine packets. He never carried pencil and paper, just a stub of pencil – I can see it now, a very, very short little red pencil, which he lost and then he’d hunt for it, frantically, through every pocket…he didn’t spend his time writing; he was part of the conversation – it was very surreptitious as far as it went.”

Under Milk Wood at the BBC

Dylan finally delivered the manuscript to the BBC on the eve of his fourth trip to North America in October 1953. BBC radio producer Douglas Cleverdon arranged to have the script copied before returning the original to Dylan who subsequently lost it in a London pub. Dylan reportedly told Cleverdon that if he could find the original script he could keep it. Cleverdon toured a number of the pubs Dylan frequented and found the script in the Helvetia pub in Old Compton Street; years later Dylan’s widow Caitlin unsuccessfully attempted to recover ownership of the script in court.

The BBC premiered their radio production of Under Milk Wood on the Third Programme on January 25th 1954. Richard Burton led the cast as First Voice, and Dylan’s friend Daniel Jones recorded the music, including the children’s sung parts, which were recorded at Laugharne School.

Burton reprised his role as First Voice and combined it with Second Voice in a 1963 BBC radio production; and Burton’s close association with BBC radio productions of Under Milk Wood was further cemented when the late actor’s recording of First Voice from 1954 was incorporated in an otherwise new production in 2003.

The first television production of the play was broadcast by the BBC on May 9th 1957, featuring Donald Houston as First Voice. Houston returned to the role in a further BBC TV production broadcast in 1964. During Dylan’s centenary in 2014 a BBC television version was produced featuring an all-star Welsh cast featuring Michael Sheen as First Voice.

Under Milk Wood on stage & screen

Stage

Under Milk Wood had it’s first cast performances at the 92Y Poetry Center in New York in the May and October of 1953, with Dylan himself playing the role of First Voice. In November 1954 a stage production took place in Geneva, arranged to commemorate the first anniversary of Dylan’s death. It would take until 1956 for the first full stage production to take place in the United Kingdom, opening at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle on Tyne, on August 13th 1956. It transferred to the Edinburgh Festival on August 21st, and then visited Liverpool, Swansea, and Cardiff, before transferring to the West End where it ran for seven months.

In 1988 a one-off stage performance (as ‘An Evening with Dylan Thomas’) was produced by Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin for The Prince’s Trust in the presence of HRH Prince Charles. The performance was based on an album version of the play produced by Sir George which featured more sung parts with music by various artists including George Martin and Elton John. Anthony Hopkins played the part of First Voice and directed the stage performance. The stage performance was recorded for television (directed by Declan Lowney) but has never been shown.

The play has become a global stage favourite, with multiple productions every year.

Television

BBC television productions of the play were broadcast in 1957, 1964, and 2014. The first two productions featured Donald Houston as First Voice, the role being taken by Michael Sheen in the most recent production.

In 1992 Welsh broadcaster S4C produced an animated version of the play with the BBC’s archive recording of Richard Burton as First Voice.

Big Screen

The first big screen adaptation was produced in 1972 when director Andrew Sinclair assembled an all-star line-up for his film that was largely shot on location in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire. Richard Burton was First Voice, his wife Elizabeth Taylor played Rosie Probert, and Peter O’Toole was Captain Cat.

A new big screen version was directed by Kevin Allen in 2014, with Rhys Ifans taking on the roles of First Voice and Captain Cat. A Welsh language version of the play based on T James Jones’ Dan y Wenallt was recorded at the same time for broadcast on S4C and in Welsh language cinemas.

Inspired by Under Milk Wood

Under Milk Wood has continued to influence and inspire in the years since it was first performed.

British jazz pianist Stan Tracey‘s 1965 jazz suite, “Under Milk Wood”, is regarded as one of the finest British jazz recordings.

British pop-artist Sir Peter Blake has undertaken the mammoth project to illustrate every scene and character from the play, a project that has taken him over 30 years. The work was the subject of a major exhibition at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, which opened in October 2013 to mark the beginning of Dylan’s centenary year.

Australian composer Tony Gould has set the play to music, and ballet interpretations of the play produced. In 2014 the play was the subject of an opera written by Swansea-born composer John Metcalf.

Language of Under Milk Wood

In Dylan Thomas’s writing, every word and phrase has been given meticulous thought and care. Under Milk Wood is no exception. It is full of word play, double meanings and inventive use of language. As the director of the first, small cast, showing of Under Milk Wood, Dylan gave his actors just one stage direction, ‘Love the words, love the words’.

In just First Voice’s opening section of Under Milk Wood, Dylan uses many different techniques. Eight of them are listed below.

Hush, the babies are sleeping …the farmers, the fishers, the tradesman and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewoman and the tidy wives.

Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of dreams.

Meet the residents of Llareggub

This is an extract from a letter from Dylan to Princess Caetani (October 1951) where he describes many of the characters in the play.

“Let me particularise, and at random. As the piece goes on, two voices will be predominant: that of the preacher, who talks only in verse, and that of the anonymous exhibitor and chronicler called, simply, 1st Voice. And the 1st Voice is really a kind of conscience, a guardian angel.
Through him you will learn about Mr Edwards, the draper, and Miss Price, the seamstress, and their odd and, once it is made clear, most natural love. Every day of the week they write love letters to each other, he from the top, she from the bottom, of the town: all their lives they have known of each other’s existence, and of their mutual love: they have seen each other a thousand times, and never spoken: easily they could have been together, married, had children: but that is not the life for them: Their passionate love, at just this distance, is all they need. And Dai Bread the baker, who has two wives: one is loving and mothering, sacklike and jolly; the other is gypsy slatternly and, all in love, hating: all three enjoy it. And Mrs Ogmore Pritchard who, although a boardinghouse keeper, will keep no boarders because they cannot live up to the scrupulous and godlike tidiness of her house and because death can be the only boarder good enough for her in the end. And, Mr Pugh, the schoolmaster, who is always nagged by his wife and who is always plotting her murder. This is well known to the town, and to Mrs Pugh. She likes nagging; he likes plotting, in supposed secrecy, against her. He would always like plotting, whoever he lived with; she would always like nagging, whoever she lived with. How lucky they are to be married. And Polly Garter has many illegitimate babies because she loves babies but does not want only one man’s. And Cherry Owen the soak, who likes getting drunk every night; and his wife who likes living with two men, one sober in the day, one drunk at night…And so with all of them, all the eccentrics whose eccentricities, in these first pages, are but briefly and impressionistically noted: all, by their own rights, are ordinary and good; and the 1st Voice, and the poet preacher, never judge or condemn but explain and make strangely simple and simply strange.”